Blind Man's Bluff Read online

  BLIND

  MAN’S

  BLUFF

  A Memoir

  JAMES

  TATE HILL

  For my parents

  and for Lori

  Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone.

  —Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  1. All the Answers

  2. Land of the Rising Sun

  3. Real Books

  4. Pass/Fail

  5. Make-Believe

  6. Incredible Shrinking World

  7. Too Long to Stop Now

  8. The Definition of Faith

  9. The D-Word

  10. Dating Tips for Those Still in Denial about Their Disability

  11. Basketball

  Acknowledgments

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The events depicted in these pages are based on my own recollections. Conversations have been reconstructed to the best of my abilities, and certain names and identifying characteristics have been changed. In a few cases, incidents have been compressed to accommodate the narrative flow.

  BLIND

  MAN’S

  BLUFF

  PROLOGUE

  IT’S FULL DARK WHEN we reach Nashville in December. Mom reads me the names of stores and restaurants as she drives, trying her best to feign excitement.

  “Looks like you’ve got an Olive Garden,” she says.

  The jewel of my new neighborhood is a mall with a JCPenney, a Baptist church, and a bookstore that only sells remaindered books. Even if I want to leave my apartment, the lack of sidewalks means navigating around a four-lane highway. Never leaving the apartment sounds like a better idea.

  I call my wife, Meredith, to say we’re close. She’s making mulled wine with a bottle of our wedding Cabernet.

  “Shouldn’t we save that for a special occasion?” I ask.

  “You moving here isn’t a special occasion?”

  Shortly after accepting my marriage proposal, Meredith took an editing job that paid twice what I earned as an adjunct instructor of composition. We married in September and lived apart while I taught one final semester in North Carolina.

  “I don’t really like mulled wine,” I say.

  “Does your mom?”

  “I don’t think so,” I say, not bothering to check with her.

  My wife is all smiles when she answers the door. She hugs her mother-in-law while I carry boxes to the corner of the living room. I used to envy Meredith’s outgoing personality. In light of recent events, I no longer trust her good moods.

  “I can’t believe we got married,” my wife told me one night in early November, two months after we were married.

  “What?”

  She repeated what she had said.

  “What are you talking about? Where is this coming from?”

  She had trouble explaining.

  I hung up on her. Moments later, unsatisfied by the fecklessness of hanging up on a cordless phone, I called her back.

  “What are you going to do when you get here?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?” I had no clue where this conversation was coming from. Recently our calls had been a little strained. We started to miss a day here and there. I blamed my frustration with how little progress I had made on the new novel. After every publisher to whom my agent sent my first novel had passed, my confidence in my writing wasn’t at an all-time high.

  When we met in graduate school, Meredith’s and my shared passion for writing had felt like a belief in the same god. Despite this compatibility, we rarely talked to each other about our work. Opening up to her about the wall I had hit seemed like a positive development.

  “We never fixed anything,” she said.

  On TV, Darrell Hammond was doing Bill Clinton in a Saturday Night Live rerun. I had muted it before calling, but left it on, the screen’s flicker the only light inside the black tunnel in which I unexpectedly found myself. I stared in the TV’s direction, but it was too far, five feet away, for my eyes to discern more than movement.

  In an email the next day, Meredith apologized for calling after drinking most of a bottle of wine. Her apology didn’t extend to the content of her words, only how bluntly she had said them. “I will not,” she elaborated days later, “be complicit in your lie.”

  I wasn’t sure which word hurt more, lie or the B-word embedded so thornily in the next line. Blindness. Your blindness. I will not help you hide your blindness from the world. She had never used that word around me before. If she knew how deeply it wounded me, would she have avoided it or moved it from quiver to bow years ago?

  It’s better and worse than you might imagine. This is what I’d like to tell people who ask about my eyesight. What most people want to know is what I see when I look at them, and the short answer is this: I don’t see what I look directly at. If I look up or to the side, I can see something, and this usually fends off further questions. This answer allows people to imagine, however erroneously, that my blind spots are smudges on the center of a mirror from which I can escape by looking elsewhere on the mirror. Lies of omission weren’t ones I hastened to correct.

  Instead of a smudge, picture a kaleidoscope. Borderless shapes fall against each other, microscopic organisms, a time-lapsed photograph of a distant galaxy. Dull colors flicker and swirl: mustard yellow, pale green, magenta.

  “That would drive me crazy,” a friend once said when I described my blind spots for her.

  The most frequent compliment heard by people with a disability is I could never do what you do, but everyone knows how to adapt. When it’s cold outside, we put on a coat. When it rains, we grab an umbrella. A road ends, so we turn left, turn right, turn around. We adapt because it’s all we can do when we cannot change our situation.

  I can still see out of the corners of my eyes, but here’s the thing about peripheral vision: The quality of what you see isn’t the same as what you see head-on. Imagine a movie filmed with only extras, a meal cooked using nothing but herbs and a dash of salt, a sentence constructed only of metaphors. To see something in your peripheral vision with any acuity, it has to be quite large. On top of this, my periphery isn’t unaffected by the blind spots.

  Looking directly into a mirror, I am not without a face. My kaleidoscopic clouds permit enough light to see pronounced contrasts like my eyes, nostrils, the crease where my lips meet. Of the many mundane abilities my remaining sight permits me, I am especially grateful for the ability to feign eye contact, if not always as convincingly as I would prefer. The closer someone’s face and the better the lighting, the more easily I can keep track of the shadows between nose and forehead. A few inches from the mirror, I can gauge with some accuracy if all the coffee I’ve consumed has stained my teeth, style my hair, ponder the accuracy of a girl who told me when I was twenty that I kind of looked like Ben Affleck, which might or might not have compelled me to defend the actor’s sometimes-problematic career choices for the next two decades.

  When our emails finally reverted back to phone calls after our argument, I asked the only question that seemed to matter: Should I move to Nashville? I had already given notice to my employer. For the past four months, I had slept on an air mattress and eaten off chipped plates I planned to donate to Goodwill.

  Meredith’s hesitation felt like an answer. She asked what I thought.

  “I think your answer is more important than mine.”

  Another pause. “If you don’t, this doesn’t have much of a chance, does it?”

  “That isn’t a yes.”

  “Then yes.”

  It wasn’t the starry tone with which she’d uttered that word when I slid an engagement ring around h
er finger, but it was better than no.

  Meredith and I barely speak while we finish unloading the car. A Christmas cartoon blares on the TV. Meredith asks Mom if she wants to try the mulled wine. There’s also pumpkin bread.

  I step into the bathroom with my coat still on. The bathroom has two doors, one leading to the hall and one to the bedroom. I lock both of them and bury my face in a bath towel. After a few minutes, I pull myself together. How apparent will it be that I have been crying? I study the blurry face in the mirror. If I stare at things long enough, I like to tell people, they eventually come into focus, but this is not true.

  1

  ALL THE ANSWERS

  THE FIRST HINTS ARE the half-erased words on the overhead projector. Most of your teachers recycle lesson plans, but from your seat in the last row of a high school lecture hall, Mrs. Jones’s smudged transparencies seem aggressively lazy. You study the notebook of the guy beside you, who also squints at the screen. His notes could be charitably described as judicious, but they contain a number of lines you couldn’t piece together.

  You tell your mom you need glasses. She makes you an appointment with Dr. Keane, the optometrist who bears a striking resemblance to Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson. “Is Dead God?” asks an Entertainment Weekly cover in his waiting room, the question floating beside the disembodied head of Jerry Garcia. You turn pages, nonchalant about the prospect of reinventing your look. If you’re being honest, the no-glasses look hasn’t gotten you very far.

  Dr. Keane sees right away what’s wrong. When he covers your right eye, the eye chart disappears. He invites you and your mom into his office. He calls you a “monocular” patient. His receptionist makes you an appointment with another doctor. Dr. Keane doesn’t seem worried.

  Weeks later, you sit before a half-dome the size of a beach ball for your first visual field test. Resting your chin on a metal ledge, you fix your eyes, one at a time, on a tiny light in the center of the orb. In your hand is a buzzer like the ones held by Jeopardy! contestants. Tiny spotlights of varying size appear throughout the dome, and you press the button whenever you see one, if you see one. Lights slide like meteors across the sphere, vanquished by the buzzer.

  According to the visual field, your right eye is fine. Your left, however, which your optometrist graded 20/400, has only peripheral vision.

  A nurse seems pleased to inject dye into your bloodstream, a test for trauma she seldom gets to administer. Two ophthalmologists take turns peering into your pupils. When no trauma is detected, they shake your hand, a chess opponent they had underestimated.

  They refer you to an optic nerve specialist at the university hospital in Morgantown. A Bea Arthur look-alike wearing a turtleneck beneath her lab coat, Dr. Ellis sees something is wrong with your optic nerve. If you had to put your medical fate in the hands of a Golden Girl, Dorothy would be your first choice.

  Dr. Ellis orders an MRI and your day trip to Morgantown becomes an overnighter. Killing time, you and your parents tour the university you have no desire to attend. All the brochures you requested at the recent college fair were for schools in the neighboring states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, even one in California.

  When the MRI shows nothing unusual, you prepare for Dr. Ellis to shake your hand. Instead, she offers a diagnosis: optic neuritis. A swelling of the optic nerve, it often goes away on its own. She orders an intravenous steroid treatment to expedite recovery.

  With that settled, your thoughts turn to the other elephant in the room, at least from where you sit. “So I’m okay to drive?”

  Dr. Ellis, without hesitation, says driving shouldn’t be a problem.

  Thank you for being a friend.

  Few milestones embody the start of adulthood like the passing of one’s driver’s test. You passed yours on the first try, the day after your sixteenth birthday. Grateful shout-out to the state trooper who gave you three attempts at parallel parking.

  Your excitement was surpassed only by your mom’s consternation. Having your license doesn’t mean you get to drive everywhere, she cautioned on the way home, but her warning rang a little hollow, coming from the passenger seat.

  Only one of your close friends has ever had a girlfriend. It seems no coincidence that he’s your only friend with a car. Another guy in school, who once sat by himself in the corner of the cafeteria and as far as you can tell has no friends at all, began dating the head majorette within weeks of obtaining his Mazda Miata. Hoping to chart a similar path, you linger for several minutes each morning after parking your pre-owned Mustang in the lot across from the school.

  Having a car is a bit of a coup. In contrast to the wealthy neighborhoods surrounding your high school, you live on a dirt road where if it hasn’t rained in a while the faucets cough out a muddy spray. Your parents got a deal on your Mustang from an uncle who owns a salvage lot.

  More than once, you leave a book in the backseat so you can go back for it and let a new audience see you in all your car-unlocking, driver’s-side-door-opening reverie. Leaving school in the afternoon, you make eye contact with as many girls as possible, looking for some change in how they see you. It’s a process, you reassure yourself.

  Spring break brings a three-day, three-night, all-expenses-paid (by insurance and your parents) stay in Charleston’s St. Francis Hospital. It wasn’t as though you had other plans. As you pack your pajamas and comic books, it feels a little like camping, if camping involved an adjustable bed, cable TV, and room service. Your private, carpeted room overlooks a tree-lined courtyard. The small TV is attached to a movable arm, allowing you to position it in front of your face, not that you need to. The vision in your right eye remains intact, and as long as you keep that eye open there’s nothing wrong with you, something you have to remind your grandmother when she visits.

  Once a day your neurologist, a friendly Indian American with a bald spot in his beard, stops by to examine your eyes. Dr. Nair reminds you of the cool senior on the tennis team who wears a diamond earring.

  Your neurologist points to the wall, instructing you where to look, and peers through a magnifying glass into your left pupil. Because you told him during your spinal tap that you want to be a doctor, Dr. Nair carefully explains what he’s looking for and how the optic nerves work.

  “Have you noticed any changes?” he asks.

  You close your right eye, blurring the room. “I don’t think so.”

  It would be unusual to see results this quickly, he says. Despite his admonition, you check your left eye frequently, wondering how your vision will return. Will it be like a telescope coming into focus? Or will it return piece by piece, like a jigsaw puzzle?

  Three afternoons of Flipper reruns come and go. Your parents bring your Easter basket to the hospital, but you can’t eat the candy. The prednisone might cause bloating and, if you don’t watch your sodium and calorie intake, weight gain. Thus, you return to school a little bloated, with one blurry eye, and braces still on your teeth for another year, but at least you have that car.

  It’s your first week back on the road, on the way to school, when a truck appears out of nowhere in the oncoming lane. You were in your own lane, and the truck was on its own side of the road, but where did it come from? You keep your eyes on the road in front of you, as one is supposed to do, as you had been doing. Your heart is still recovering from the sudden appearance of the truck when a station wagon zooms past you only a moment after you saw it.

  From your second hospital bed in as many months, you try to follow the French Open on a wall-mounted TV. You can barely make out the red clay of Roland-Garros beside the pale green wall. After points and right before a serve, the camera zooms in on the faces of Mary Pierce and Mary Jo Fernández, but the points themselves you can only follow with your ears. One day you’ll learn the difference between the pop of a volley and the click of a topspin lob, understand the time lapse between crosscourt ground strokes versus shots down the line, gauge the grace and difficulty of a return from the aston
ishment of spectators and TV commentators. Today you would settle for knowing which shots are in or out. The crowd seems to cheer harder for Mary Pierce, who is half French, but you don’t understand the chair umpire, having taken Spanish for the last three years.

  Within days of your good eye going the way of the bad one, Dr. Nair ordered another round of steroids. Due to availability, your room this time is in the pediatric ward of a hospital across town, much farther from home. The lack of carpet makes these quarters feel more like a hospital. When your grandmother visits, it’s harder to shrug off her concern.

  Optimism led you to bring your school books to the hospital for this second treatment. Whether you would have completed your homework, even if you could still read, is up for debate. In recent years, you’ve rarely found homework more enticing than The Arsenio Hall Show or Saturday Night Live reruns. In elementary school, batteries of tests with more positive results allowed you to skip an entire grade, but a lazy B average has steadily undermined that potential. Each time your grades dipped, first in junior high and again in high school, you weren’t alarmed. After all, you remained a year younger than your peers. And don’t grades only measure how hard you try?

  A few times you open your history book, but the print is too small to read even with your nose touching the page. You’ve had to memorize the buttons on the remote control. Several times a day you stare at your hand, trying to decide if there’s more or less of it than the day before. The first two mornings you’re excited to open your eyes and check for improvements. Upon finding none, waking up becomes less appealing.

  “How can you stay in here all day?” your dad asks, annoyed to find you in your pajamas at three in the afternoon.

  “Where am I supposed to go?”

  “Go for a walk,” he says. “You don’t have to stay in this damn room.”